You are here

Photos: Goose habitat in NPR-A

Black brant geese congregate at the Teshekpuk Lake Special Area to shed their worn-out flight feathers. The geese have altered their distribution on the North Slope to take advantage of new and favorable habitat along the Arctic Ocean shore.

Rapid coastal erosion, aided by scarcity of sea ice, has exposed the ice-rich permafrost beneath the active layer just below the surface that the Teshekpuk Lake Special Area of the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska.

A patch of land shows the difference in vegetation. On the left are the low-biomass, high-protein, salt-tolerant plants, preferred by geese, that are thriving as permafrost thaws and erosion eats away shorelines; on the right are the high-biomass, salt-intolerant tundra plants on which caribou forage.

Soil core obtained from existing goose grazing lawn along the Smith River in the Teshekpuk Lake Special Area of the National Petroleum Reserve - Alaska. Buried peat layer broken open. Closer examination of the buried peat layer demonstrates that non-salt-tolerant vegetation from the past was buried in sediment which now supports high-quality goose forage.

USGS Biologist Brandt Meixell and other scientists spend summers in the National Petroleum Reserve, where they are monitoring changes in plants and in goose behavior. They are doing some experiments to see what happens when tundra is cooled by shade or heated by greenhouse structures.

Diminished Arctic sea ice and thawing permafrost, phenomena that reinforce the climate change cycle and perpetuate the region’s warming trend, are not bad for all creatures of the north, a new study has found.